In recent years, the global climate has greatly changed, the frequency of extreme hot weather has become larger, resulting in the reduction of a large number of food crops, and making a great impact on the production and life.
Studies have shown that high temperatures will be the most important environmental factors threatening global food security: for example, high temperatures have become a major contributor to the threat of wheat production in Europe (wheat is very sensitive to high temperatures during grain filling), instead of drought; and the production of rice, maize and other major food crops is also seriously affected by high temperature in recent 30 years.
In China, high temperature has caused great loss to the rice yield. Especially in the south of Yangtze River, double-season early rice flowering and filling period, early blooming period of early rice to heading flowering stage, and early-maturing Japonica Rice flowering and grain filling stage in the middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River, are usually in the hot summer season, therefore high temperature stress results in that the rice can not normally loose powder, fertilization, and grain filling is not full, thereby greatly reducing the rice yield and its quality.
It is an important measure to deal with the high temperature damage on rice by understanding the high temperature resistance mechanism of rice from the genetic aspects, and applying genetic engineering means to cultivate high quality rice varieties with good high temperature resistance. It is of great significance to promote the continuous and steady development of rice production, and meantime, research on high temperature resistance genes in rice and the mechanism of its action will also provide the genetic resources and reference for high-temperature breeding of other crops.
However, the mechanism of the resistance of plant to high temperature is still unknown. Therefore, in order to change the high temperature resistance of plant varieties effectively and specifically, there is an urgent need in the art for the development of proteins and coding genes thereof associated with high temperature resistance.